Of course. But you're paying the round-trip on every page request, you're page-blanking every time--it just feels worse. For some things (where you expect documents--a news site or whatever) that's not the worst thing in the world, but the modern web is increasingly less document-based and more application-based.

And if initial payload is truly that much of a concern, Preact + Redux is under 5KB minified/gzipped.